Star Trek: Enterprise Third Season
Original air dates: September 2003 – May 2004
Executive Producers: Rick Berman, Brannon Braga
Captain’s log. Enterprise has entered the Delphic Expanse in an attempt to find the Xindi, whom they were told were responsible for the attack on Earth that killed seven million people.
Their travels take them to a prison planet, to a slave auction, and to a dude living his best Phantom of the Opera life. They also find the cause of the Expanse’s weirdness: some nasty spheres that warp the space and cause the anomalies.
As the season progresses, we learn more about the Xindi, including that there are five different sub-species: Primates, Aboreals, Aquatics, Insectoids, and Reptilians. A civil war destroyed their homeworld—and wiped out the sixth sub-species, the Avians—and they’re now searching for a new one. But they also have been told by the Guardians, extradimensional aliens who have aided them in the time of strife, that humans will wipe out this new homeworld in the future, so the Xindi must destroy Earth first.
In truth, the Guardians are the people who built the spheres, information they have kept from the Xindi. The spheres are designed to convert our space-time into something they can live in.
With occasional detours to the Fun With DNA™ Planet and the Western Planet, Enterprise learns that a Primate named Degra is in charge of building a large super-weapon that will finish the job started by the prototype that fired on Central America. Over the course of the season, Archer and the gang manage to convince at least some of the Xindi Council that it would be wrong to blow up an entire damn planet, and at the same time Enterprise realizes that the Xindi aren’t just evil murdering bad guys, but a refugee people in fear for the future.
Archer manages to get the Primates, Arboreals, and Aquatics on his side (the latter takes some convincing), but the Reptilians and Insectoids remain on Team Sphere-Builders and continue with the plan to blow up Earth. In the end, after many sacrifices and serious damage to Enterprise (and with help, not just from 3/5 of the Xindi but also Shran and the Andorians), they save Earth and destroy the sphere network. But Earth’s entire history may have been altered?
Highest-rated episode: A tie between “Stratagem” and “The Forgotten,” both well-deserved 10s.
Lowest-rated episode: “North Star,” with an even more well-deserved 1.
Most comments (as of this writing): “Similitude” with 57, which is not surprising, given the moral issues raised by the storyline.
Fewest comments (as of this writing): “Doctor’s Orders” with 23. I guess folks figured they talked about that plot enough when it was Voyager’s “One.”
Favorite Can’t we just reverse the polarity? From “Harbinger”: Reed and Hayes stop the alien by actually reversing the polarity of the plasma coils. It’s awesome.
Favorite The gazelle speech: From “Anomaly”: Archer shows that he’s a real man who doesn’t take any crap by shoving Orgoth in an airlock, because screw the rules, he’s the kind of guy who gets shit done.
Favorite I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations: From “North Star”: When T’Pol and Tucker are trying to obtain a horse, the stablemaster immediately asks them what happened to theirs—since they were obviously from out of town (the town is small enough that the stablemaster would know all the locals by sight), how’d they get there if not on horseback? While Tucker is stunned into silence because he didn’t think of that, T’Pol weaves a bullshit story about how their horses died in the heat. She does in that halting and hesitating manner that actors always use when they’re faking their way through a conversation. It’s never even remotely convincing, yet the person they’re talking to is almost always convinced by it.
I shouldn’t blame this scene for a trope that is a near-universal constant in performative fiction, but it has always annoyed me. Over-emphasizing the hesitating nature of it makes it blindingly obvious that the speaker is pulling the answer directly out of their asses, yet this rhetorical method rarely fails in the fictional setting. It works when played for laughs (to give one Trek example, the mechanical rice-picker bit from the original series’ “The City on the Edge of Forever”), but not in a serious situation. I much prefer it when the characters actually bluff their way through these conversations properly (to give another Trek example, when Dax was stuck in twenty-first-century San Francisco in DS9’s “Past Tense, Part I,” she referred to her combadge as a brooch and her Trill spots as tattoos without missing a beat).
Favorite Florida Man: From “The Xindi”: Florida Man Stars In Impromptu Porn Movie With Science Officer.
Favorite Optimism, Captain! From “Doctor’s Orders”: Phlox apparently needs “active” DNA to synthesize the anti-virus. It’s not clear what makes DNA “active” in this context, but apparently a peach T’Pol slobbered on suffices, but why that works when it’s been hours, possibly days, since she bit into it while whatever DNA samples Phlox must have around doesn’t is left as an exercise for the viewer.
Favorite Good boy, Porthos! From “Doctor’s Orders”: Until he starts hallucinating T’Pol, Porthos is Phlox’s only company on the ship, and it’s rather adorable watching them together, whether going on runs, talking about Porthos’ loyalty to Archer (at one point, Phlox does research and turns up a dog named Scruffers, who traveled three thousand kilometers to be reunited with his human), and with the pooch just generally being Phlox’s handy companion. Sadly, the dog is virtually abandoned once the fake T’Pol shows up…
Favorite Better Get MACO: From “Anomaly”: Three MACOs join the boarding party for the looted ship and the sphere, and the MACOs aid in the defense of Enterprise when its boarded, though they add nothing to either mission, not doing anything that Reed’s security detail couldn’t have handled. Indeed, the whole point of having the space Marines is to help them with things like repelling boarding parties, so you’d think they’d be better at it…
Favorite Ambassador Pointy: From “Twilight”: Soval tries to get T’Pol to abandon Archer and the humans and come home in the alternate timeline. She tells him to go fuck himself.
Favorite The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined… From “Azati Prime”: T’Pol FINALLY admits that time travel is a real thing, having apparently been convinced by traveling in time to twenty-first-century Detroit. It’s a testament to what a stubborn ass she’s been on the subject that Archer is genuinely surprised that she feels that way even after getting experiential evidence of time travel…
Favorite Blue meanies: From “Zero Hour”: For some inexplicable reason, they did not play the Mighty Mouse theme when Shran showed up.
Favorite No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: From “Harbinger”: The use of Vulcan neuropressure as a fig-leaf for sex in previous episodes becomes a transparent fig-leaf in this one, culminating in T’Pol coming on to Tucker in a manner that wouldn’t be out of place in a 1980s teen sex comedy.
Favorite More on this later… From “Azati Prime”: The Federation Starship Enterprise, introduced in “The Cage,” and seen captained by Pike (SNW, the original series’ “The Cage” and “The Menagerie,” season 2 of Discovery), Kirk (the original series and several movies), Decker (The Motion Picture), and Spock (The Wrath of Khan) had the registry NCC-1701. At the end of The Voyage Home, a new Enterprise was constructed (the original having gone boom in The Search for Spock) and it had the registry of NCC-1701-A, seen subsequently in The Final Frontier and The Undiscovered Country. That set a precedent that has been continued through several spinoffs. The Enterprise-B was seen in Generations; the Enterprise-C in TNG’s “Yesterday’s Enterprise”; the Enterprise-D throughout TNG, in Generations, and in Picard’s “Vox” and “The Last Generation”; the Enterprise-E in First Contact, Insurrection, and Nemesis; the Enterprise-F in “Vox”; and the Enterprise-G in “The Last Generation.” The ship Daniels brings Archer to is the Enterprise-J in the twenty-sixth century, which means they’ll go through the G, H, and I before commissioning the J in a hundred-plus (obviously very tumultuous) years…
Favorite Welcome aboard: This season had a particularly long list of new recurring characters: Nathan Anderson (Kemper), Molly Brink (Talas), Steven Culp (Hayes), Daniel Dae Kim (Chang), Josette di Carlo (the Sphere-Builder emissary), Scott MacDonald (Dolim), Seth MacFarlane (random engineer dude), Sean McGowan (Hawkins), Randy Oglesby (Degra), Tucker Smallwood (the Xindi-Primate councilor), and Rick Worthy (Jannar). In addition, already-established recurring regulars Gary Graham (“Twilght”), Matt Winston (“Carpenter Street,” “Azati Prime,” and “Zero Hour”), and Jeffrey Combs (“Proving Ground” and “Zero Hour”) show up. Plus, Adam Taylor Gordon twice plays a younger version of Tucker in “The Xindi” and “Similitude.”
Several Trek veterans are back for another go-round: Stephen McHattie and Richard Lineback (“The Xindi”), Dell Yount (“Rajiin”), John Cothran Jr. (“The Shipment”), Glenn Morshower and James Parks (“North Star”), Leland Orser (“Carpenter Street”), Conor O’Farrell and Gregory Wagrowski (“Chosen Realm”), Granville van Dusen (“Proving Ground”), Thomas Kopache (“Harbinger”), and the mighty Casey Biggs (“Damage”).
We get three Robert Knepper moments: Roger Cross (“Extinction”), Sam Witwer (“The Shipment”), and Jeffrey Dean Morgan (“Carpenter Street”).
But my favorite guest stars are three fantastic women who show up for one episode each and make great impressions: Emily Bergl is the one bright spot in the otherwise awful “North Star,” Noa Tishby is superb as a MACO Tucker flirts with in “Harbinger,” and Kipleigh Brown is tragically brilliant as the dream-image of the deceased Engineer Taylor in “The Forgotten.”
Favorite I’ve got faith… From “Damage”:
“‘We can’t save humanity without holding onto what makes us human.’ Those were your words to me.”
“I’m no happier doing this than you are—but we’re not going to make a habit of it.”
“Once you rationalize the first misstep, it’s easy to fall into a pattern of behavior.”
–T’Pol throwing Archer’s words back in his face, Archer insisting he can quit any time, and T’Pol speaking the wisdom of the junkie.
Favorite Trivial matter: A tie between the ones for “Anomaly” and “E2” which both had incredibly trivial matters in them…
It’s been a long road… “Your captain’s sacrifice will not be forgotten.” This season definitely gets an A for ambition. The notion of doing a season-long story arc wasn’t radical in 2003, but it was not as common as it is twenty years later, either.
Unfortunately, the execution is mostly a disaster.
I will give them credit for a generally strong climax. The run of episodes from “Proving Ground” to “The Council” is some very good stuff (despite the drag effect of “Hatchery” and “E2”), even if the repetitive “Countdown” and the bludgeony “Zero Hour” end things kind of weakly, if loudly.
But getting there is a slog. The Expanse is this horrible area of space that’s so dangerous the Vulcans were desperate to keep Enterprise out of there for their own safety. Yet when they get there, they just encounter stuff that they easily could’ve come across in the rest of the galaxy. We get The Prison Episode, The Space Pirates Episode, The Slave Girl From Outer Space Episode, The Western Episode, The Phantom of the Opera Ripoff Episode, The Time Travel To When The Show Is Actually Filmed Episode, and, of course, Fun With DNA™. However, with very rare exceptions—the horror-movie-esque “Impulse,” the wonderful alternate history of “Twilight,” and the magnificently Trekkish “The Shipment”—there’s not a lot here that really a) moves the story forward and b) is any good. B) is the bigger problem, truly, not aided by all the different through-lines to the season beyond stopping the Xindi, very few of which work.
Let’s start with what seems to be the biggest addition: the Military Assault Command Operations troops, a.k.a. the MACOs. After all the fanfare about adding space Marines to the crew, they proceed to do absolutely nothing that couldn’t be done by Reed’s security force. Worse, on several occasions (“Anomaly,” “Rajiin,” “Twilight,” “Hatchery”), the MACOs were actively incompetent. They were never properly integrated into the cast, with no individual MACO appearing with a speaking part for more than a few episodes. A half-assed attempt was made to manufacture a conflict between Hayes and Reed in the fifteenth episode of a twenty-three-episode season, which is far too little way too late.
Then we have the use of “Vulcan neuropressure,” ostensibly a physical manipulation technique used for therapeutic purposes, in reality a feeble excuse for borderline softcore porn scenes between T’Pol and Tucker (a border that’s crossed in “Harbinger”). On top of that, T’Pol is turned into a junkie for no compellingly good reason, a lovely bit of character assassination. Seriously, T’Pol has consistently been portrayed as the only grownup on the ship. Why would she decide in the middle of a dangerous, critical mission to experiment on her emotional state?
The season suffers from several intrusions of the dumbshit Temporal Cold War into the storyline, most obnoxiously in the wretched “Carpenter Street,” but also in “Azati Prime” and “Zero Hour.”
Buy the Book
The Jinn Bot of Shantiport
And then we have the Xindi themselves. At first, we get what seems to be a nifty five-species setup, but after that, the writers take the lazy way out, as it quickly becomes clear that the Xindi who look like humans or cute animals are friendly, while the ones who look like less conventionally cuddly animals and who look like vermin are the unrepentant bad guys.
Plus, at no point do we ever get an adequate explanation for why the Xindi sent their prototype to Earth to, in essence, warn Earth that they were coming, a move of colossal tactical idiocy.
The one thing the season does well is something Trek has always excelled at, to wit, the compassionate and conversational solution rather than the violent one. From Kirk’s realizing that his violent assumptions were wrong in “Arena” and “Errand of Mercy” to both DS9’s Dominion War and Discovery’s Federation-Klingon war ending through acts of compassion and cleverness rather than military might, Trek at its best has always been at its best when its characters talk to each other and are nice to each other, whether it’s Picard telling Q that he needs the entity’s help against the Borg or the Discovery crew convincing Species 10C that they are sentient and can they stop blowing up our planets please or Jonathan Archer convincing at least some of the Xindi Council—as well as the scientist who’s building the superweapon—that maybe genocide isn’t the solution to the Xindi’s problems.
In “The Forgotten” we also have one of Trek’s best meditations on death. One of Enterprise’s best features has been its repudiation of Trek’s appalling reliance on the redshirt trope, and this season in general and “The Forgotten” in particular do a great job of representing that repudiation.
This season was, in many ways, a harbinger of things to come. Of the five shows that have come after Enterprise, three of them—Discovery, Picard, and Prodigy—have adopted the story-in-a-season model. However, those seasons are generally between ten and a dozen episodes, not twenty-three. (Prodigy’s first season was twenty episodes, though it can very easily be separated into two discreet ten-episode bits.) Truly, the Xindi arc would’ve benefitted tremendously from needing fewer episodes to tell the story…
Warp factor rating for the season: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be an author guest at ConnectiCon XX in Hartford at the Connecticut Convention Center this weekend. He’ll have a table where he’ll be selling and signing books, and also will be doing some panels. His full schedule can be found here.
